It's a mirage

THE celebrated discovery of the heaviest element ever found was just an illusion. Red-faced scientists who thought they'd found element 118 in 1999 have now backed down and retracted their claim.

The elementdubbed "ununoctium"was supposedly discovered at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. A team led by Ken Gregorich fired high-energy krypton ions at a lead target. Within the debris, they thought they could see the telltale disintegration of element 118, containing 118 protons and 175 neutrons, along with its decay product, element 116 (New Scientist, 19 June 1999, p 27).

The new elements decayed in a split second. But the fact that they popped up at all backed theories, touted since the 1970s, that there's an "island of stability" for atoms with approximately 114 protons and 184 neutrons.

Scientists in Germany and Japan tried to replicate the results, but without success. Prompted by this, Gregorich's team reanalysed the ...

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